Tag Archives: Self-Deception

In far mode we emphasize basic values a lot more, relative to practical constraints; in near mode we do the opposite. … This certainly fits my more detailed opinions on large scale policy and the future. You have to pay attention to an awful lot of detail in order to figure out which policies are best, or what is likely to actually happen in the distant future. But most people seem to quickly form opinions on such topics using simple value associations. When they can identify a clear value association, people seem pretty willing to form opinions, which seems to me a vastly overconfident attitude. (more)

When people talk about larger social scales, like nations or the world, or when they talk about long time scales, they prefer to talk values, not practical facts and constraints. One might argue that people neglect physical and organizational constraints because they don’t understand such things well. But people also tend to ignore political constraints, which they usually say that they understand pretty well.

That is, people tend to show a lot of interest in tracking the various political coalitions, and their varying power and preferences. But people show far less interest in working out what sort of political compromises might be feasible and desirable. Instead, people usually prefer to talk about what they’d do if they personally ruled the world, if their nation ruled the world, or if their favored coalition ruled the world or their nation.

Yes, figuring out what you personally want can sometimes be a useful first step. You might then reevaluate what coalitions to support, and then focus on which possible political comprises and deals you’d be most interested in helping to promote. But people rarely go beyond that first step — talking about what they personally want. And people are usually rather reluctant, even hostile, to discussing specific compromises proposed by others.

The obvious interpretation here is that politics isn’t about policy. While people talk as if they care about outcomes and want to discuss big issues in order to influence outcomes, what they really want is to declare and express values. Expressing values helps them to signal loyalty to like-minded folks, and a commitment to norms their community holds dear. Discussing compromise, in contrast, risks your seeming a traitor to your allies, and lacking firm value principles.

We often praise and criticize people for the things they do. And while we have many kinds of praise, one very common type (which I focus on in this post) seems to send the message “what you did was good, and it would be good if more of that sort of thing were done.” (Substitute “bad” for “good” to get the matching critical message.)

Now if it would be good to have more of some act, then that act is a good candidate for something to subsidize more. And if most people agreed that this sort of act deserved more subsidy, then politicians should be tempted to run for office on the platform that they will increase the actual subsidy given to that kind of act. After all, if we want more of some kind of acts, why don’t we try to better reward those acts? And so good acts shouldn’t long remain with an insufficient subsidy. Or bad acts without an insufficient tax.

But in fact we seem to have big categories of acts which we consistently praise for being good, and where this situation persists for decades or centuries. Think charity, innovation, or artistic or sport achievement. Our political systems do not generate much political pressure to increase the subsidies for such things. Subsidy-increasing proposals are not even common issues in elections. Similarly, large categories of acts are consistently criticized, yet few politicians run on platforms proposing to increase taxes on such acts.

My best interpretation of this situation is that while our words of praise give the impression that we think that most people would agree that the acts we praise are good, and should be more common, we don’t really believe this. Either we think that the acts signal impressive or praise-worthy features, but shouldn’t be more common, or we think such acts should be more common, but we also see large opposing political coalitions who disagree with our assessment.

That is, my best guess is that when we look like we are praising acts for promoting a commonly accepted good, we are usually really praising impressiveness, or we are joining in a partisan battle on what should be seen as good.

Because my explanation is cynical, many people count it as “extraordinary”, and think powerful extraordinary evidence must be mustered before one can reasonably suggest that it is plausible. In contrast, the usual self-serving idealistic explanations people give for their behavior are ordinary, and therefore can be accepted on face value without much evidence at all being offered in their defense. People get mad at me for even suggesting cynical theories in short blog posts, where large masses of extraordinary evidences have not been mustered. I greatly disagree with this common stacking of the deck against cynical theories.

Back in July 2010 Kerry Howley published a nice New York Times Magazinearticleon the tensions between my wife and I resulting from my choice to do cryonics. The very next month, August 2010, is the date when, in Howley’s new and already-celebrated book Thrown, her alter-ego Kit first falls in love with MMA fighting:

Not until my ride home, as I began to settle back into my bones and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin. … From that moment onward, the only phenomenological project that could possibly hold interest to me was as follows: capture and describe that particular state of being to which one Sean Huffman had taken me.

I’ve read the book, and also several dozen reviews. Some reviews discuss how Kit is a semi-fictional character, and a few mention Kit’s pretentiousness and arrogance. Some disagree on if Kit has communicated the ecstasy she feels, or if those feelings are worthy of her obsession. But all the reviewers seem to take Kit at her word when she says her primary goal is to understand the ecstasy she felt in that first encounter.

Yet right after the above quote is this:

And so naturally I began to show up places where Sean might show up— the gym where he trained, the bar where he bounced, the rented basement where he lived, the restaurants where he consumed foods perhaps not entirely aligned with the professed goals of an aspiring fighter. I hope it doesn’t sound immodest to say that Sean found this attention entirely agreeable.

Kit does the same to another fighter named Eric, and later she gets despondent when Erik won’t return her calls. She tracks him down to a fight, hugs him in front of the crowd, and is delighted get his acceptance:

My moment of embarrassment had already transformed into a glow of pride. The entire room saw that I was his, and he mine.

While Kit only feels ecstasy during an actual fight, she spends all her time as a “groupie” to two fighters, Sean and Erik. (She says she is a “space-taker”, not “groupie”, but I couldn’t see the difference.) Kit mainly only goes to fights when these men fight, even when such fights are months apart. Kit’s ego comes to depend heavily on getting personal attention from these fighters, and her interest in them rises and falls with their fighting success. The book ends with her latching on to a new fighter, after Sean and Erik have fallen.

It seems to me that if Kit had wanted mainly to study her feeling of ecstasy while watching fights, she would have gone to lots of fights, and tried to break her feelings down into parts, or looked at how they changed with context. She could have also talked to and studied other fighter fans, to break down their feelings or see how those change with context. But Kit instead sought to hang with successful fighters between fights, when neither she nor they felt this ecstasy she said was her focus. She didn’t even talk with fighters much about their ecstasy feelings. What mattered most to Kit apparently was that fighters associated with her, and that they won fights.

Kit quits her philosophy program:

I knew what they would turn my project into, these small scholastics with their ceaseless referencing of better men would, if they even allowed my explorations as a subject of dissertation, demand a dull tome with the tiniest flicker of insight buried underneath 800 pages of exegeses of other men’s work. Instead of being celebrated as a pioneer of modern phenomenology, I would merely be a footnote in the future study of Schopenhauer, whom, without my prodding, no one would study in the future.

It seems to me that Kit is self-deceived. She thinks she wants to study ecstasy, but in fact she is simply star-struck. The “ecstasy” feeling that hit her so hard was her subconscious being very impressed with these fighters, and wanting badly to associate with them. And she felt very good when she succeeded at that. By associating with their superiority, she could also feel feel superior to the rest of the world:

I would write my fighterly thesis, but I would not fraternize with the healthy-minded; better to leave them to their prenatal yoga, their gluten-free diets, their dull if long lives of quietest self-preserving conformism.

Of course Kerry Howley, the author, does not equal Kit, the voice Kerry chooses to narrate her book. Kerry may well be very aware of Kit’s self-deception, but still found Kit a good vehicle for painting an intimate portrait of the lives of some fighters. But if so, I find it odd that none of the other dozens of reviews I’ve read of Thrown mention this.

Added 21Oct: Possible theories:

Most reviewers read the book carefully, but are too stupid to notice.

Most reviewers are lazy & only skimmed the book.

Reviewers hate to give negative reviews, & this sounds negative.

Readers crave idealistic narrators, and reviewers pander to readers.

My reading is all wrong.

Added 27Oct: Note that at the end of the book Kit articulates no insight on the nature of ecstasy. You might think that if understanding ecstasy had been her goal, she might have a least reflected on what she had discovered.

When we use words to say how we feel, the more relevant concepts and distinctions that we know, the more precisely we can express our feelings. So you might think that the number of relevant distinctions we can express on a topic rises with a topic’s importance. That is, the more we care about something, the more distinctions we can make about it.

But consider the two cases of food and love/sex (which I’m lumping together here). It seems to me that while these topics are of comparable importance, we have a lot more ways to clearly express distinctions on foods than on love/sex. So when people want to express feelings on love/sex, they often retreat to awkward analogies and suggestive poetry. Two different categories of explanations stand out here:

1) Love/sex is low dimensional. While we care a lot about love/sex, there are only a few things we care about. Consider money as an analogy. While money is important, and finance experts know a great many distinctions, for most people the key relevant distinction is usually more vs. less money; the rest is detail. Similarly, evolution theory suggests that only a small number of dimensions about love/sex matter much to us.

2) Clear love/sex talk looks bad. Love/sex are to supposed to have lots of non-verbal talk, so a verbal focus can detract from that. We have a norm that love/sex is to be personal and private, a norm you might seem to violate via comfortable impersonal talk that could easily be understood if quoted. And if you only talk in private, you learn fewer words, and need them less. Also, a precise vocabulary used clearly could make it seem like what you wanted from love/sex was fungible – you aren’t so much attached to particular people as to the bundle of features they provide. Precise talk could make it easier for us to consciously know what we want when, which makes it harder to self-deceiveabout what we want. And having available more precise words about our love/sex relations could force us to acknowledge smaller changes in relation status — if “love” is all there is, you can keep “loving” someone even as many things change.

It seems to me that both kinds of things must be going on. Even when we care greatly about a topic, we may not care about many dimensions, and we may be better off not being able to express ourselves clearly.

When a man loves a woman, …. if she is bad, he can’t see it. She can do no wrong. Turn his back on his best friend, if he puts her down. (Lyrics to “When a Man Loves A Woman”)

Kristeva analyzes our “incredible need to believe”–the inexorable push toward faith that … lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. … Human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. (more)

This “to believe” … is that of Montaigne … when he writes, “For Christians, recounting something incredible is an occasion for belief”; or the “to believe” of Pascal: “The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves; so that if lacking true objects, they must attach themselves to false ones.” (more)

We often shake our heads at the gullibility of others. We hear a preacher’s sermon, a politician’s speech, a salesperson’s pitch, or a flatter’s sweet talk, and we think:

Why do they fall for that? Can’t they see this advocate’s obvious vested interest, and transparent use of standard unfair rhetorical tricks? I must be be more perceptive, thoughtful, rational, and reality-based than they. Guess that justifies my disagreeing with them.

Problem is, like the classic man who loves a woman, we find hard to see flaws in what we love. That is, it is easier to see flaws when we aren’t attached. When we “buy” we more easily see the flaws in the products we reject, and when we “sell” we can often ignore criticisms by those who don’t buy.

Why? Because we have near and far reasons to like things. And while we might actually choose for near reasons, we want to believe that we choose for far reasons. We have a deep hunger to love some things, and to believe that we love them for the ideal reasons we most respect for loving things. This applies not only to other people, but to politicians, to writers, actors, ideas.

For the options we reject, however, we can see more easily the near reasons that might induce others to choose them. We can see pandering and flimsy excuses that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. We can see forced smiles, implausible flattery, slavishly following fashion, and unthinking confirmation bias. We can see politicians who hold ambiguous positions on purpose.

Because of all this, we are the most vulnerable to not seeing the construction of and the low motives behind the stuff we most love. This can be functional in that we can gain from seeming to honestly sincerely and deeply love some things. This can make others that we love or who love the same things feel more bonded to us. But it also means we mistake why we love things. For example, academics are usually less interesting or insightful when researching topics where they feel the strongest; they do better on topics of only moderate interest to them.

This also explains why sellers tend to ignore critiques of their products as not idealistic enough. They know that if they can just get good enough on base features, we’ll suddenly forget our idealism critiques. For example, a movie maker can ignore criticisms that her movie is trite, unrealistic, and without social commentary. She knows that if she can make the actors pretty enough, or the action engaging enough, we may love the movie enough to tell ourselves it is realistic, or has important social commentary. Similarly, most actors don’t really need to learn how to express deep or realistic emotions. They know that if they can make their skin smooth enough, or their figure tone enough, we may want to believe their smile is sincere and their feelings deep.

Same for us academics. We can ignore critiques of our research not having important implications. We know that if we can include impressive enough techniques, clever enough data, and describe it all with a pompous enough tone, our audiences may be impressed enough to tell themselves that our trivial extension of previous ideas are deep and original.

As suggested by sex is near, love is far, it seems that we don’t directly feel romantic love. Instead, we rather abstractly interpret our feelings as being love or not, depending on whether we think our relation fits our abstract ideal of love:

When adult women were asked about love and how they have experienced love in their own lives, … many women found it difficult to talk about their feelings generally and love in particular. There was an absence of falling in love stories and rather, women explained that they ‘drifted’ into relationships, or they ‘just happened’. …

Love continues to be used as the legitimating ideology for family, relationships and marriage. Moreover, the representation of love in society is omnipresent; it is depicted in blockbuster films, on daytime television, in novels, in music and in numerous other cultural formats. This ‘commercialization’ of love has commonly captured a specific form of love: one which promises salvation for both sexes, although perhaps more so for women. …

Love was mentioned often by the 23 young, mostly heterosexual (one woman identified as bisexual), adult women with whom this paper is concerned. Yet, the context in which love was mentioned was almost always in relation to abstract discussions about relationships and marriage. Romantic discourses were shunned in favour of pragmatic, objective assessments of emotion. When I asked them to tell me about their own relationships they often seemed to struggle to put their feelings into words and there was a distinct absence of falling in love stories. These women did not openly desire love and many accounts of relationships were based on ‘drifting’ into relationships with friends or finding that love ‘just happened’. …

Eleanor commented, ‘about a month ago I suddenly woke up and I just thought I’m in love with you. And I thought I was before that point but I just woke up and I just knew’. … The absence of love stories is documented in participants’ use of cover stories, metaphors and a ‘drift’ discourse. Yet when asked directly about love, respondents did not shy away from talking about their feelings. …

Narratives of whirlwind romances were rare but the significance and meaning of love, as well as the romantic image of ‘the one true love’, led the respondents to define love in a very specific way. Thus it was common for them to denounce the love they felt in past relationships in the form of ‘I thought it was love . . .’. Michelle was a good example of this: ‘I thought I was in love with him and in hindsight it was quite an inappropriate [relationship]’. Michelle later ‘realizes’ that it was not love at all. (Carter, 2013; ungated)

That is, these women don’t see love in the details of how their relations started or grew. At some point they just decide they are in love. Later, if they change how they think about the relation, they may change their mind about if they were in love. So if they feel love, it is a feeling attached to and drawn mostly from an abstract interpretation of a situation, rather than from particular concrete details. Love is far indeed.

We tend to neglect things we cannot see. We focus on visible (Baryonic) matter in the universe, but there is about twenty times as much dark matter and energy that we know almost nothing about. We focus on brain activity which engages the surrounding world, but about twenty times as much brain energy is used by brains at “rest” and apparently doing nothing.

Pain is probably like this too. For some kinds of pain we are very aware, and make sure others around us are aware too. But for other kinds of pain, we don’t let others know, and are often are in denial to ourselves. There may be lots of dark pain around that we rarely see.

Why do we hide and deny pain? Some pain makes us look bad. We’d look weak to complain of pains that many folks put up with without complaining. And when there are norms about what we should want or not want, we can show norm violations by showing that we deeply want things that we should not, or don’t want things that we should.

Aunt Hilda might really bug you when she visits, but you are supposed to love her. A lack of praise from colleagues might really hurt, but you aren’t supposed to be so self-centered. Some norm-violating pain might not so much make you look bad, as make others feel obligated to visibly disapprove, which would then cause problems.

You might think that dark pain doesn’t matter if we have repressed it from our consciousness, since only conscious pain matters. But consciousness isn’t either or, it is a matter of degree, and repressed pain can infect our mood and feelings in many indirect ways. You might think folks in much pain would seek therapy, so there can’t be many of them. But people seek therapy mainly when they feel dysfunctional; those who still function with lots of pain may just solider on.

If most folks have twenty times as much pain as they show, and live lives of quiet desperation, does this make their lives not worth living? Would it be better if they had never existed? Hardly. In addition to dark pain, there may also be dark joy.

Dark joys could be those that make us look bad, or those that violate norms. We can get illicit joy from being acknowledged as high status, or from submitting to those we think worthy of dominating us. We can get joy from the pain and suffering of our rivals. We can enjoy foods that aren’t good for us, or enjoy just being lazy and neglectful of things to which we are supposed to pay attention.

So does dark joy cancel dark pain, adding up to lives about as worthwhile in the dark as they seem in the light? I just don’t know. But it sure seems an important question. As is the question of which lives around us actually have more net joy over pain. To answer such questions, we’ll need to dig deeper into our self-deceptions, and shine light on things usually dark. Seems a noble quest to me. Just don’t expect people to like you for illuminating the things they keep dark.

It ain’t ignorance causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so. Josh Billings

Economics is important. So the world could use more of it. In the same sense, ignorance of economics is even more important. That is, the world could even more use a better understanding of how ignorant it is about economics. Let me explain.

Lately I’ve had a chance to see how folks like computer scientists, philosophers, futurists, and novelists think (in separate situations) when their work overlaps with areas where economists have great expertise. And what usually happens is that such folks just apply their ordinary intuitions on social behavior, without even noticing that they could ask or read economists to get more expert views. Which often leads them to make big avoidable mistakes, as these intuitions are often badly mistaken.

Yes, even folks who do realize that economists know more may not have the time to ask about or learn economics. But it seems that usually most people don’t even notice that they don’t know. Their subconscious quickly and naturally supplies them with subtly varying expectations on a wide range of social behaviors, and they don’t even notice that these intuitions might be wrong or incomplete. Which leads me to wonder: how do people ever realize that they don’t know physics, or accounting, or medicine?

Most people throw and move objects often, and have strong intuitions about such things. And if physics was only about such mechanics, I’d guess most people also wouldn’t realize that they don’t know physics. So it seems that a key is that “physics” is also associated with a bunch of big words and strange complex objects with which people don’t feel familiar. People hear words like “voltage” or “momentum”, or see inside cars or refrigerators, and they realize they don’t know what these words mean, or what how those devices work.

Similarly for accounting and medicine, I’d guess that it is a wide use and awareness of strange and complex accounting terms and calculations, and strange and complex medical devices and treatments, that suggest to people that there must be experts in those fields. And even in economics, when people realize that they don’t know where money comes from, or which of many possible auction designs is better, they do turn to economists to learn more.

Kids often learn early on of the existence of specialized knowledge, from the existence of specialized language and complex devices. Kids like to show off by finding excuses to use specialized words, and showing that they can do unusual things with complex devices. And then other kids learn to see the related areas as those with specialized expertise.

So I’d guess that what the world most needs on economics is to get more kids to show off by using specialized concepts like “diminishing returns” and complex devices like auctions. And then they need to hear that this same “economics” can be used to work out good way to do lots of social things, from buying and selling to voting to law to marriage. It is not so much that the world actually needs more kids using these concepts and devices. The important thing is to create a general impression that there are specialists for these topics.

The biggest obstacle to this plan, I’d guess, is that naive social science infuses too much of the rest of what kids are taught. Various history and “social studies” classes use naive social intuitions to explain major world events, and novels are read and discussed as if the naive social science they use is reasonable. Those who like using these things to push social agendas would object strongly to teaching instead that, e.g., you usually can’t figure out who are the bad guys in key historical events without complex economic analysis.

So the bottom line is that people don’t use enough econ because econ tends to conflict with the things people want to believe about the social world. Even teaching people that they are ignorant of econ conflicts, alas.

“It’s classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Top Gun, 1986

Today, secrets are lumpy. You might know some info that would help you persuade someone of something, but reasonably fear that if you told them, they’d tell others, change their opinion on something else, or perhaps just get discouraged. Today, you can’t just tell them one implication of your secret. In the future, however, the ability to copy and erase minds (as in am em scenario) might make secrets much less lumpy – you could tell someone just one implication of a secret.

For example, what if you wanted to convince an associate that they should not go to a certain party. Your reason is that one of their exes will attend the party. But if you told them that directly, they would then know that this ex is in town, is friendly with the party host, etc. You might just tell them to trust you, but what if they don’t?

Imagine you could just say to your associate “I could tell you why you shouldn’t go to the party, but then I’d have to kill you,” and they could reply “Prove it.” Both of your minds would then be copied and placed together into an isolated “box,” perhaps with access to some public or other info sources. Inside the box the copy of you would explain your reasons to the copy of them. When the conversation was done, the entire box would be erased, and the original two of you would just hear a single bit answer, “yes” or “no,” chosen by the copy of your associate.

Now, as usual, there are some complications. For example, the fact that you suggested using the box, as opposed to just revealing your secrets, could be a useful clue to them, as could the fact that you were willing to spend resources to use the box. If you requested access to unusual sources while in the box, that might give further clues.

If you let the box return more detail about their degree of confidence in their conclusion, or about how long the conversation took, your associate might use some of those extra bits to encode more of your secrets. And if the info sources accessed by those in the box used simple cacheing, outsiders might see which sources were easier to access afterward, and use that to infer which sources had been accessed from in the box, which might encode more relevant info. So you’d probably want to be careful to run the box for a standard time period, with unobservable access to standard wide sources, and to return only a one bit conclusion.

Inside the box, you might just reveal that you had committed in some way to hurt your associate if they didn’t return the answer you wanted. To avoid this problem, it might be usual practice to have an independent (and hard to hurt) judge also join you in the box, with the power to make the box return “void” if they suspected such threats were being made. To reduce the cost of using these boxes, you might have prediction markets on what such boxes would return if made, but only actually make them a small percentage of the time.

There may be further complications I haven’t thought of, but at the moment I’m more interested in how this ability might be used. In the world around you, who would be tempted to prove what this way?

For example, would you prove to work associates that your proposed compromise is politically sound, without revealing your private political info about who would support or oppose it? Prove to investigators that you do not hold stolen items by letting them look through your private stores? Prove to a date you’ve been thinking lots about them, by letting them watch a video of your recent activities? Prove to a jury of voters that you really just want to help them, by letting them watch all of your activities for the last few months? What else?

In general, this would seem to better enable self-deception. You could actually not know things anywhere in your head, but still act on them when they mattered a lot.

To answer the question posed in my last post, here are some situations where it makes sense to forgo the large benefits of things like religion, to care about far truth:

You are stuck in your ways, like a smoking addict. You admit it would have been better for you had you become more religious early on, but alas you fell in with the wrong crowd, and now the costs of change for you outweigh religion’s gains. If you are nice, you’ll warn young folks to avoid your downfall.

Contrarian far claims with big personal consequences are true. If choosing cryonics would gain you five or more expected years of life (over its costs), and you are one of the rare people who would actually do something so contrarian after being intellectually convinced of its advantages, and if you can reliably discern when a majority is wrong, then you’ll need to think accurately about far topics to find such opportunities. For non-contrarian far claims with personal consequences, you could just follow the crowd without thinking.

You have a good chance of being respected as a far topic expert, by a community that evaluates claims in truth-correlated ways. If you could be a famous cosmologist, you might try to create cosmology claims that will look good when evaluated by the tests cosmologists will apply. The gains from becoming a famous cosmologist could outweigh the risk that by becoming more truth oriented you will forgo religion’s gains. Beware, however, that truth-correlated is not the same as true – most communities say their far claim tests are more truth-correlated than they actually are.

So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you. Go away, and sin no more.